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There are many jobs in the world, and lawyer is one of the more stressful. If you have mental health issues (as both fashionable and over-diagnosed as that term is now), you should consider a different career.

The comment above, that people with claustrophobia ought not to consider careers as submariners, is directly on point. As a profession we have an obsession on solely selecting on academic performance, to the detriment of anything else. We are doing a disservice both to clients, and to prospective junior lawyers, some of whom we break. The military analogy above can be taken further: the Royal Navy, British Army, and Royal Air Force operate the Admiralty Interview Board, Army Officer Selection Board, and Officer and Aircrew Selection Centre, respectively, to select their officer candidates. All three selection centres deliberately put candidates under physical and mental pressure, to see how they cope. The weak are weeded out. This isn’t for some brutal, sadistic whim – it is simply because some people will not handle the pressure. No one is helped if those people are allowed in.

This is common sense. Just as we cannot have ugly models, asthmatic athletes, blind lollipop ladies, or deaf air traffic controllers, we can’t have military personnel who, under pressure, ‘go wibble’. Ability to handle stress is a bona fide occupational requirement. The original Army Officer Selection Board, the so-called Regular Commissions Board, was created because of this very problem: lot of bright upper-class young men were drafted into the Army in the First World War, and broke under the pressure. It transpired that an merely Oxbridge education and “good breeding” wasn’t enough to lead soldiers and engage the enemy in dismounted close combat. There are parallels with highly-paid, highly-stressful legal jobs which we ignore at our peril.

Perhaps we are doomed to suffer from polite, politically correct fantasies in the West. After all, they are cathartic, and we do feel morally virtuous asserting them. But, as Orwell warned, “...we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.” Fortunately, no one is stupid enough to suggest that the armed forces must ignore people’s resilience, or lack thereof, when selecting candidates. Perhaps that is because, ultimately, we know that such delusions will bump up against Orwell’s solid battlefield reality.

Should we, perhaps, be a little more honest when selecting for training contracts, and put applicants under a lot more pressure, to see how they cope?

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